Lights Are On But No One's Home

Almost 200 empty dollhouses are arranged to form a hilly village in a dark room. The village has no geographical coordinates, and no people live there. Its name is simply “Place (Village),” and, as a work of art, it forms the cornerstone of Rachel Whiteread’s eponymous exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, on display from Oct. 15th through Jan. 25th.

The dollhouses fit together snugly, forming an eye-pleasing, three-dimensional patchwork of windows, roofs, and lights that gleam from small light bulbs and ceiling fixtures inside the homes. A few of the houses face outward, their innards exposed, holding only tiny pieces of wallpaper and the revelation that there was nothing else inside.

After falling asleep while considering this review, I found myself trapped between two “villages” like Whiteread’s in a dream, being led by an old man with white hair. I asked him where the parks were, and he replied that there were none. But where do people play? I wondered. This was the question that remained after “Place (Village).” Where do people play here, in these facsimiles of houses? There is no space between them for a community.

And this, more than the absence of people and their technologies and the the sun that lights their world, is what disturbed me. This piece is a collage of houses. These houses are no longer just magazine photos on a page, as those that appear in her studies for “Place (Village),” which are also featured in the Whiteread exhibit. Instead, they are physical structures, and perhaps should not be cut so easily from their context, stripped of their contents, and placed together in a museum.

And although “Place (Village)” succeeds in suggesting a sense of melancholy, the method feels overdone. The dollhouses immediately bring to mind images of deserted Disneylands, Lilliputian worlds, and models for gated suburban housing communities. While the art is beautiful, it fails to strike the viewer in a more significant way, resulting in a pointed absence of emotion that stems from the work’s lack of originality.

Her reasons for piecing together this exhibit could be simple. Discovering and purchasing each dollhouse, whether on eBay or in person, was clearly a thrill, and she has said that she enjoyed unpacking the houses and observing their meticulous detail. The rest of the work featured in the exhibit illustrates her appreciation for the look and feel of things. From the early drawings she did with acrylic and correction fluid on Chartwell paper, showing her preoccupation with lines and textures, to the series of doors that she cast out of plaster from real doors, she seems to appreciate the underappreciated object.

The most compelling piece, Cabinet XI, along with Whiteread’s paper collages, clarifies the conceptual basis for “Place (Village).” Cabinet XI is a metal cabinet, made of the same material as a gray file cabinet but resembling a medicine cabinet. It contains cast boxes of different sizes, in light yellow, light gray blue, and gray. The small boxes are stacked and fit into the cabinet, again so snugly that their geometry is comforting, even when the idea of using some gray plaster as soap or toothpaste is a bit repulsive. It’s like kids’ blocks—less colorful, and less square. But neat. They suggest that art could be created by placement.

It is one thing to treat imagined soap as an object. “Place (Village)” takes it further, however, by treating the houses as physical, aesthetic constructions, causing their souls to vanish along with their contents. In real life, the beauty of houses in aggregate comes from the whole patchwork of messy memory, rooted in warm doughy snacks, wrestling on a sunny lawn, and the hole left when the kids leave for college. Whiteread purposely absents these things, dislocating the dollhouses and drawing together their lines and levels. But placed in the museum, they evoke no nostalgia, only a minor, damp melancholy in a darkened room.

—Staff writer Elsa S. Kim can be reached at elsakim@fas.harvard.edu.